10 Years? Cowabunga!

‘Beverly Hills, 90210,” someone once observed, has characters “you’d like to hit with a giant cream pie.” And “Melrose Place,” the same observer noted, “is a case where twentysomething refers to IQ as well as age.”

Who originated these opinions of drama series that went on to flourish on Fox? My memory is a little hazy here, but I’m fairly certain it was me.

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How apt a metaphor this is for Fox in its unsteady infancy: the Rodney Dangerfield of networks, winning no respect in many circles, getting clobbered by critical cream pies and hearing from false prophets that long-term survival as a fourth network was a very long shot and that anything approaching parity with older, established ABC, CBS and NBC was unthinkable.

Wrong. Started by Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller, the Fox network invaded prime time a decade ago this week and is now the most precocious 10-year-old in the history of television.

It has shrewdly courted and exploited the strength of former independent stations in an increasingly splintered TV universe. It has successfully poached on the older networks’ monopoly of televising glamour sports, consummating massive pacts with the NFL and professional baseball. It has aired the Emmys, symbolically the very essence of mainstream TV. And although Fox remains fourth in prime-time ratings this season, figures from Nielsen Media Research show it averaging a healthy 12 million viewers per hour of prime time, compared to 13.7 million for ABC, 13.9 million for CBS and 15.4 million for NBC.

Although the gap in overall advertising rates is still significant, Fox is drawing ever closer in raw audience. Its most popular series, “The X-Files,” ranked 10th nationally in the Nielsens two weeks ago, for example, and was even nearer the apex of prime-time rankings for smart, exhilarating TV.

And don’t forget that Fox programs have those young demographics that quicken the pulses of so many advertisers, with season figures showing it tied with ABC for second place among the 18-to-49 crowd, trailing only NBC.

No wonder that Fox, itself still a callow kiddie, is now a role model for the still-diapered WB and UPN networks.

Hardly all of Fox’s baby shoes qualify for bronzing, however. Rerunning its decade of programs in my memory, the acronym CARRY comes to mind: Creative, Asinine, Raunchy, Race-minded and Young.

CREATIVE

Fox’s most vivid legacy is that of a feisty network that took risks, as upstarts tend to do, while its older, fatter rivals sat complacently on their dwindling audience shares.

Not that taking chances always paid off in Nielsens. Nothing exemplified Fox’s willingness to stand by a series whose ratings lagged far behind its thunderbolts of brilliance than “The Tracey Ullman Show,” whose 1987-90 run exposed U.S. viewers to a uniquely gifted comedic actress from England.

Some of Fox’s most inventive series were even better-kept secrets, one of them the Ferris Bueller-inspired “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose,” a bracingly fresh, strange comedy about a savvy high school student whose environment and exotic supporting characters emerged in a milieu of odd camera angles and unusual visual and sound effects.

Another was “The Ben Stiller Show,” a short-lived revue largely featuring bright, sometimes-hilarious parodies of movies and TV. Still another was that bent beauty “Bakersfield P.D.,” whose half-black, half-Italian protagonist was partnered with a redneck. And at its best, “The Edge” was a series whose dark, even mean sketches teetered hilariously and perilously on the margins of comedy. So much so that its savage ridiculing of “Beverly Hills, 90210” and one of its stars, Tori Spelling, so outraged her father and the Fox drama’s powerful executive producer, Aaron Spelling, that he reportedly demanded a public apology.

Meanwhile, “America’s Most Wanted” blazed a trail in prime time for manhunt-type series that at once reflected and helped fatten a national obsession with crime, as did the network’s subsequent “Cops,” a prototype for a brigade of similar “reality” series that would surface in the ‘90s.

When it comes to Fox’s boldness leading directly to both ratings and longevity, however, two of its series stand out in particular. One is its science-fiction noir phenomenon, “The X-Files,” the other a cartoon whose principal UFO is named Homer. Its name: “The Simpsons,” of course.

“Beverly Hills, 90210” has the ritzier ZIP Code, but Springfield, USA, is home to Fox’s true upper crust, the Simpsons, who for years have greeted you in one of the funniest, most distinctive, most subversive comedies ever to travel the airwaves. And one whose emergence in 1989 gave Fox its first broad slathering of credibility, as “The Simpsons” almost immediately generated a merchandising boom, from T-shirts to coffee mugs, that helped burn its crude-looking characters deep into the U.S. psyche.

Created by irreverent cartoonist Matt Groening and expanded from tiny vignettes that first appeared on Ullman’s series, this animated sitcom has been from its inception the antithesis of a traditional sitcom, making it the philosophical soul-mate of its coarser Fox predecessor, “Married . . . With Children” (but not of “King of the Hill,” the new cartoon about a more conventional family with which it’s now paired on Sundays).

Like the protagonists of the “The Simpsons,” agents Mulder and Scully of “The X-Files” aren’t performing quite up to their former standards these days. Nevertheless, this series remains one of TV’s most captivating and original hours, a feast of such foreboding and cinematic finery from Chris Carter that, in the manner of its shadowy plots, it defies conventional explanations.

ASININE

“Werewolf,” which didn’t live past Fox’s first season, was no bargain. Nor is the network’s newest series for the teething set, “Pauly.” But there’s asinine and there’s asinine, and taking by far the biggest bite out of Fox’s reputation was “The Chevy Chase Show,” a late-night debacle of 1993 that lasted just long enough to make Chase and his co-conspirators in futile comedy the butts of everyone else’s jokes.

Here was Fox this time taking a hard fall because of timidity. “The Chevy Chase Show” was its fourth stab at establishing a late-night presence (including an early tumultuous flop starring Joan Rivers), this one with a cavalcade of weary, unfunny bits that made Chase look especially awkward and foolish. Not that he needed much help.

RAUNCHY

Ever the rebel, Fox has always viewed tastelessness as the mother’s milk of its effort to at once distinguish itself from ABC, CBS and NBC and stay abreast of cable. To that end, some of its comedies have trafficked in foulness for the sake of foulness.

And even some of its most recent specials--such as “When Animals Attack,” “The World’s Scariest Police Chases” and other frightening documentary hours that inflame feelings--appeal largely to society’s basest instincts.

Ironically, the lines of separation are now blurrier, with the big three networks having grown ever cruder themselves in an effort to remain competitive and stop their hemorrhaging of viewers to other TV outlets. An unwanted result, from their perspective, is the program ratings that the industry adopted in response to aggressive nudging from viewers, President Clinton and Congress.

But raunch, thy other name is “Married . . . With Children,” which helped launch Fox’s first night of prime-time programming in 1987. If there’s such a thing as primitive hilarity, this is it. Primitive and gross. Sometimes funny, sometimes vulgar, sometimes vulgar and funny, the Bundys of “Married . . . With Children” join “The Simpsons” in redefining the sitcom, but do it much differently. Oh, Homer is surely no wiser than Al Bundy, and the parental advice given Bart and Lisa Simpson is often as boneheaded as that spewed by the Bundys. But the Simpsons have never evidenced the level of verbal mud wrestling and libido that has made “Married . . . With Children” one of the most popular and durable series on Fox.

RACE-MINDED

Fox has sought to stay in the black financially by designating portions of its schedule specifically for blacks. That has meant putting on many comedies with predominantly black casts, from sitcoms “Martin” and “Roc” to “In Living Color,” an uneven hour of sketches that mostly spoofed African Americans and, at their best, were extremely funny. The “black strategy” is one that the UPN and WB networks also are following.

Credit Fox also for creating TV’s first live-action series about a black superhero in “M.A.N.T.I.S.,” and for giving a shot to “South Central,” a wonderful, all-too-brief comedy-drama that some blacks charged perpetuated negative stereotypes by depicting a fatherless African American family in an inner-city environment of drugs and crime. On the contrary, “South Central” was one of the most profound, best-executed series of the ‘90s, and not remotely close to being as racially cliched as some of Fox’s more conventional half-hour comedies, whose broad stereotypes of African Americans are rarely second-guessed by blacks.

YOUTH

Fox is more than a niche network. But the young crowd has always been foremost in the minds of its programmers, an emphasis that at times drives them into a quagmire of infantile comedies but also opens their eyes to an occasional serious-minded series the likes of “Party of Five,” which traces the lives of young siblings living on their own.

But it’s the decidedly middle-brow “Beverly Hills, 90210,” with melodramas about high-schoolers and collegians, and “Melrose Place,” with its warren of swell-looking young swingers, that have emerged through the years as Fox signature series, attracting large, loyal followings from teens to young professionals. Who would have thought it? Certainly not some TV critics.